Hello,

SO, here's what i have:
1)"Normal" boot procedure leads to black screen.
2)upon power on, bios passes off to grub, I hold shift to get to grub menu. with normal boot highlighted i press "e". down in the boot line i change "quiet splash" to "nosplash i915.modeset=0" with this i can watch the startup procedure via text and every time it will load through a few startup scripts then finish loading "init-bottom....done" and just sit there, cursor blinking at me... I've left it overnight hoping that it was maybe downloading something in the background or whatever other string of hope i might grasp at, but no luck.
3)upon power on, bios passes off to grub, I hold shift to get to grub menu. with normal boot highlighted i press "e". leaving splash alone this time i change "$linux_gfx_..." to "text", it'll spit me right into ubuntu text login which i then have command prompt, but i don't know what to do with it...

So this is my first experiment into linux and a lot of this will need to be simplified for me. My problem is very similar to a lot of other posts I have seen about not booting and showing simply a black screen. To clarify, this is not an "out of sync" issue: the monitor is on and receiving signal, it just happens to be receiving all black. I have tried as many of the suggestions as I could find and have only had a successful, full gui boot twice. And i have no idea what i did, but it asked me to do some updates, which i did, then it all went to crap again.

all suggestions will be appreciated!

Thanks,
JP